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Angela Becerra Vidergar

FreakAngels - 0 views

www.freakangels.com/

steampunk Warren Ellis Paul Duffield webcomics disaster fiction comics

shared by Angela Becerra Vidergar on 08 Dec 08 - Cached
  • Angela Becerra Vidergar on 08 Dec 08
     
    Free, weekly ongoing comic written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Paul Duffield. British disaster fiction/steampunk webcomic to be published soon as paperback/hardcover graphic novel.
Angela Becerra Vidergar

"Difference engines and other infernal devices: history according to steampunk" - 0 views

ezproxy.stanford.edu/searchFulltext.do

criticism literature steampunk academic

shared by Angela Becerra Vidergar on 11 Dec 08 - No Cached
  • In the introduction to The Other Victorians, Steven Marcus states that ''as we try to understand the past we try to understand ourselves in relation to the past'' (xix). Marcus's words, as much as they provide a rationale for historiography in general, are particularly pertinent to the fascination that the Victorian period has for contemporary audiences. We recognize ourselves in a play of similarity and difference, or, as Marcus puts it, the Victorians' ''otherness connects them to us,'' though, he cautions, ''connection is nevertheless not identity.'' While Marcus allows for historical breakthroughs, that is, for moments of radical change, he still considers Victorianism the first half of the paradigmatic bracket within which we still operate at the present time
  • he insists that the transfer of culturally marginal materials into the mainstream takes place the same way today as it did a hundred years ago--''split off from what might have been expected to accompany [them]--impulses of a social revolutionary kind'' (154). In other words, what we share with the Victorians are essentially the same social, economic, and political structures, as well as a sense that cultural transformation can or will take place without affecting them in any direct or immediate way
  • what makes the Victorian past so fascinating is its unique historical ability to reflect the present moment
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Depending on how exactly the present re-/constructs the Victorian past, it will lend itself to a variety of ideological purposes. Early forms of the feminist movement, the glory days of British imperialism and colonialism, industrialization, urbanization, and proletarization--they all can be construed as variants of contemporary issues as long as the paradigm of historical continuity is upheld by cultural critics like Marcus
  • examine respectively the scientific and the supernatural discourses whose intertwining makes the Victorian p.245 period so fascinating to contemporary readers
  • Steampunk constitutes a special case among alternative histories, a science fiction subgenre that postulates a fictional event of vast consequences in the past and extrapolates from this event a fictional though historically contingent present or future.
  • A steampunk novel, such as Gibson's and Sterling's The Difference Engine , follows the formula in positing, among other things, that Victorianism takes a turn for the exotic when Charles Babbage introduces the computer more than a hundred years before its historical adven
  • Considering how quickly steampunk has fragmented into a bewildering variety of styles, critics would be best off considering their own definitions as working hypotheses, tentative, evolving fictions in themselves.
  • postmodern fantastic historiography
  • In one, fabulation or mythomania (369) conjures up a world of mixed ontologies, which conveys ''the feel of the real past better than any of the ''facts'' themselves'' (368)
  • In the other, ''the purely fictional intent is underscored and reaffirmed in the production of imaginary people and events among whom from time to time real-life ones unexpectedly appear and disappear''
  • means of specific historical detail, by a pastiche of the rhetoric of Victorian literature, and by the introduction of fantastic technologies that might not have existed a hundred years ago but have the right ''feel.'
  • placing imaginary and real-life people side by side
  • steampunk focuses on technology as the crucial factor in its understanding and portrayal of Victorianism. In adopting the name ''steampunk'' that is to say, in chosing the steam engine as the most appropriate icon of the past to describe itself, it makes technology its main focus. Since the contemporary world is highly technological, any past in which it would see itself reflected must share, or rather, must be made to share, its cultural agenda
  • What Rosenheim suggests here is that a specifically technological history is discontinuous and erratic enough to defy extrapolative prediction. To the degree that the historical changes produced by technological breakthroughs are ''literally unimaginable,'' they demand metaphorical strategies to be represented properly, strategies the fantastic can provide in great range and variety
  • More like Jameson's ''postmodern fantastic historiography'' and less like science fiction's more conventional alternative histories, steampunk is primarily concerned with foregrounding the fictionality of its narrative universe.
  • Instead, these authors employ a pseudo-scientific rhetoric that, in keeping with science fiction's fictive technologies, reminds us that all disciplines claiming unproblematic access to the truth operate within the framework of the same narrative conventions and are subject to historical and cultural change
  • To be sure, steampunk takes the textuality of history for granted. It does so when it mixes historical figures and fictional characters or when it fictionalizes historical characters. Figures like Lady Ada Byron in The Difference Engine, Whitman and Dickinson in Walt and Emily, or Queen Victoria in Victoria appear to contemporary readers primarily as textually mediated. Our knowledge of them depends on texts written by or about them
  • Angela Becerra Vidergar on 11 Dec 08
     
    Article in Extrapolation by Steffen Hantke.
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